Introduction

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A slightly outdated introduction which I’ll change later and will make prettier

The topic I want to investigate is the (quantitative) difference between music by musicians with perfect pitch vs relative pitch. In a lot of musical scenes, perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) is adored like it is some kind of godsend. On one hand, perfect pitch only means you can identify pitches quickly, which would not necessarily make you a better musician. On the other hand, using it as a tool to learn music theory faster and easily identifying pitches when playing in some kind of ensemble could really make someone a better (subjectively, of course) musician. Listening to music is not the same as playing music and identifying music is not the same either.

It’s not hard to identify that my natural comparison groups would consist of artists (PP artists vs RP artists). However, I’m not quite sure yet as to how I want to sample these artists. Just choosing some PP artists and some RP artists would easily fall to biases, so I should definitely think a lot about how I want to sample the artists. Keeping differences that are due to genre out of the comparison will definitely be one of the biggest challenges for researching this corpus. I think the most interesting artist to research in this corpus is Jacob Collier, since he seems to have one of the most brilliant and specific absolute pitches known to humankind, and he has made some astoundingly complex music, in which absolute pitch definitely seems to have had an impact in the way he has challenged conventional music theory rules. Examples of crazy Jacob Collier songs would be Everlasting Motion (feat. Hamid El Kasri), With The Love In My Heart, etc. I will use his music for analyses of specific songs.

Portfolio

LA Girls - Charlie Puth chordogram


I haven’t been able to do much yet, but at least here is a chord-o-gram of a song by Charlie Puth who has PP.

The structure of Hideaway by Jacob Collier (tonal and timbral self-similarity matrices)


In the pitch graph, you can see very clear boxes, especially around the 200-300 mark. These indicate novelty. The 200-300 mark is the bridge, which is why it is the clearest box (since bridges are, generally, melodically very different from the verse and chorus). You can also see some diagonal lines around the 75-200 mark, which indicate repetition. In the timbre graph however, you do not see these diagonal lines, apart from the one through the middle that indicates that we’re graphing the same song against itself. This means that there seems to be no or very little repetition within timbre. However, since the whole timbre matrix is almost completely blue, this indicates that there is very little timbral change.

First let’s compare a classical piece written by an artist with PP vs RP


A comparison of the playlists “This is Mozart” and “This is Haydn”. Mozart had absolute pitch, while Haydn did not. As you might be able to see, Haydn’s pieces have a wider range of valence for both his minor and major pieces than Mozart, especially in the high valence (positive mood) range. The compositions of both artists have a low level of energy, which is consistent with their style, but interpretations of the pieces by the orchestras performing the pieces could also have an effect. Mozart’s pieces also seem to have a wider distribution of energy in his pieces in major.

Conclusions

I haven’t concluded anything

About the author

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Image of me

An image of me

Favorite Tracks

name artist.name album.name
California Fashawn California
On The Sunny Side Of The Street Dizzy Gillespie Dizzy 100
Frontin’ (feat. Jay-Z) - Club Mix Pharrell Williams The Neptunes Present… Clones
Ether Nas Stillmatic
Megitsune BABYMETAL BABYMETAL
Will Call (feat. Elliott Skinner & Victoria Canal) Brasstracks Golden Ticket
Foto’s Van Jou En Mij (Flits) F Drama Op De Dansvloer
Toast Koffee Rapture EP
Layla Derek & The Dominos Magic Of The Seventies
Jive Samba - Live In Japan/1963 / 1989 Digital Remaster / Digital Version Cannonball Adderley Blue Note Trip 8: Swing Low/Fly High

Top Artists

name genres
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu j-idol, japanese electropop
BABYMETAL comic metal, idol rock, j-metal, kawaii metal
Jacob Collier indie soul, uk alternative pop
The California Honeydrops bay area indie, deep new americana, funk, indie folk, modern funk
Eminem detroit hip hop, hip hop, rap
Jason Mraz acoustic pop, neo mellow, pop, pop rock
50 Cent east coast hip hop, gangster rap, hip hop, pop rap, queens hip hop, rap
blackwave. belgian hip hop
Snoop Dogg g funk, gangster rap, hip hop, pop rap, rap, west coast rap
Duke Ellington adult standards, african-american classical, bebop, big band, cool jazz, harlem renaissance, jazz, jazz piano, lounge, swing, vocal jazz

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About me

I’ll add text later. This is randomly generated post-modernism. “Class is fundamentally responsible for hierarchy,” says Sartre; however, according to Werther[1] , it is not so much class that is fundamentally responsible for hierarchy, but rather the absurdity of class. The main theme of Reicher’s[2] critique of the semiotic paradigm of discourse is the role of the observer as reader.

The primary theme of the works of Pynchon is not, in fact, narrative, but prenarrative. However, Sontag’s essay on Lyotardist narrative implies that academe is capable of significance. Cameron[3] suggests that we have to choose between Lacanist obscurity and patriarchialist neodialectic theory.

In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the concept of textual consciousness. It could be said that Lacan uses the term ‘subsemantic discourse’ to denote the stasis, and eventually the defining characteristic, of capitalist language. Bataille promotes the use of predialectic desublimation to read sexual identity.